THE right guy won. Forget what your heart may have been yelling, forget how much you might like Phil Mickelson, how much you cheered him on at Augusta, how much you wanted to help drag him halfway to a Grand Slam with your gallery pleas yesterday afternoon. Forget, for a moment, that Retief Goosen is the Stepford Golfer, as bland and vanilla as day-old pound cake. And understand this:

The right guy won the 104th U.S. Open.

The right guy overcame fast greens and stiff winds and a back-nine charge from Mickelson that threatened to lift Shinnecock Hills all the way to the sky. The right guy, playing the right way, overcame one of the most remarkable home-field advantages in the history of golf, and still managed to walk off the 72nd hole with his second Open championship pressed against his chest.

On a day when the world’s greatest golfers were reduced to sniveling, sniggling whiners, when they couldn’t wait to tell you just how hard it was to walk around Shinnecock’s august lawns, this is what Retief Goosen did: He one-putted 12 greens. He one-putted six greens in a row on the back nine, No. 13 through No. 18, when a misstep on any one of them night have stamped Mickelson’s name on the trophy for good.

With 60,000 people rooting against him, Goosen kept finding the center of the cup.

You’re damn right the right guy won.

“Every few minutes, someone else would shout out, ‘Retief is in the rough!’ or ‘Retief is in the bunker!’ ” said Mickelson, who was gracious as always in defeat, who distinguished himself by matching Goosen’s final-round 71 but who couldn’t overcome a disastrous three-putt on the 17th. “And every time, you’d look up at the board, see he made par, and think: something’s not right.”

In truth, everything was right for Goosen, especially from 13 through 17 when he was given little margin for error, asked for none, and needed none. On 13, he’d twice found the fescue, once with his drive, once with his approach, and still rescued par. On 14, he was staring at an almost certain double, if not worse, and jarred a 15-footer for the best bogey of his life. On and on, all the way to 17, when he tapped in a 3-footer to secure a sweet sandy.

“I’ve putted that well before in a big spot,” Goosen said. “At Southern Hills [where he’d won his first Open, in 2001], I putted that way. You have to if you’re going to win a tournament like this . . . under [these] conditions.”

Ah. Right. The conditions. Someday, golfers will understand that if there is one thing weekend warriors do not want to hear from them, ever, it is the avalanche of excuses that tumbles out of a field bested by a tough course like Shinnecock. Everyone from Tiger (“They lost the golf course today.”) to Mickelson (“I played some of the best golf of my life and still couldn’t break par.”) shook their heads and stammered at the gauntlet Shinnecock became.

One man simply shook his head and worried about putting the ball in the hole. That man was Retief Goosen.

“Once you have the opportunity to win a championship like this, you have to do everything right,” Goosen said, sitting next to the Open trophy, sounding so matter-of-fact it sounded as if he was describing an oil change.

Mickelson, no longer a star-crossed runner-up, just a disappointed one, concurred. He’d walked on the No. 17 tee one shot up, and he’d single-handedly turned Shinnecock Hills into Yankee Stadium, Game 7 against the Red Sox. By the time he walked off, it sounded more like the Meadowlands for a Devils-Ducks December matinee.

“You have to hand it to Retief,” Mickelson said, shaking his head in admiration. “He played as great as you could possibly ask a guy to play in that spot.”